Dropping the Distaff
by onewithroses
Summary: There are monsters in the woods, his father had said, and Stiles knew it was true. A ghostly fairytale with Prince Derek and the Jail-Keeper's son.


knead my creases with your lips.  
hold me by both hips firmly  
and roll me into your unbleached  
flour skin-dust lifts  
fingerprints from you.  
slip me through each pore, stew  
my bones until we fall  
asleep without touching;  
wait for the trace of tissue  
(i will never wholly kiss you).

From The Shape of Your Tongue, Triny Finlay

A year before the end, there was ice on the lakes that bracketed the city. The snow and cold froze the mountains, trickled into the streets, and tore into the cobbles between the two small train stations at either end of the city. This meant the jail house was more of a shelter, catering to any who could manage to find a reason to be there-if only overnight. Stiles' dad spent most of his time there, tending the fire and receiving small portions of bread or thin beef broth from outsiders. He handed those out to the less fortunate, keeping only a portion for himself in lieu of money.

It was too cold to quibble and the dark hung around the valley too long in the morning and came too quickly at night. Even the bravest shepherds stayed tucked away when they could.

Which is how Stiles and Scott ended up free in the afternoon-free from what little they called school. Their homes had merged two years ago-too quickly, really, after Scott's father disappeared across the southern lake and Stiles mother, they said, left to return to the fairy folk. They also said, of course, whispering too loudly to be ignored that Stiles should have gone with her.

He was a bit queer, they said. The way he talked with his hands, the way he was almost always moving-or far too still and staring at the hearth fires.

Stiles ignored them.

It was, after all, a lie to make them feel better. His mother was buried at the edge of the church, iron hanging heavy around her tombstone even if he visited daily to remove it.

"We should go home," Scott wheezed, his lungs seizing against the cold even though Stiles had pushed layers of thick coarse shirts at him that morning. He looked lumpy in the light from the setting sun-a patterned of blue and brown stuffed like a pillow. "My mom is going to skin us alive."

"She will anyway." Stiles cupped his hands before his face and breathed but it only made him feel colder. "Mr. Harris told her you didn't do your lettering."

Neither of them had, really. Stiles had learned how to read and write at his mother's knee at seven and Scott was more inattentive than ignorant. Both could write if they wanted. Neither did. The boys going to school was more of a warm respite for Mrs. McCall than a necessity, anyway. If they stayed home during the day they only got in the way of her bandage making. The schools that might have truly interested them were too far away-over a half an hour by train and far too expensive.

"We'll lose privileges," Scott warned, and Stiles laughed-swinging onto an empty dock on the northernmost river where the frozen water shuffled ice against the wood.

"Well," Stiles stuffed his hands into his jacket sleeves, walking backwards to study Scott's face in the growing gloom. "There are things that I needed losing."

He meant the shadowing, the worried looks, the grumbling protection from the whispers. Stiles and Scott were friends, but Stiles did not want that from him and didn't know how to ask him to stop. It was one thing to be called a changeling-it was another to drag in someone else to the misfortune. Stiles could pick his own battles; Scott was too earnest about _everything_.

It made him hard to discredit and harder still to shake off when he wanted to visit the cemetery. The sudden day-to-dayness chafed.

"_Stiles_." The annoyance signaled another long conversation and Stiles turned away abruptly, looking out onto the empty waterway for a distraction, an escape.

He didn't expected to find one.

Two feet to the left of the dock was all wrong.

It looked like a woman-woman shaped and dressed in a green shrug that was tattered and stained. It hung loose around her breasts, dipping low and dark in the cold water, just above where the ice buffeted her skin.

She was washing clothes.

Her hands dipped into the water, face turned away from the dock-plunging a bloody white shirt passed the ice and into the water. Over. And over. And over again.

A basket floated by her side, where in any other situation it might have been hugging her hip.

Clothes during the winter were washed quickly or not at all. All water froze and most clothes that were attempted to be cleaned simply ended up stiff and damp for days with not even the hearth fires not quite ringing the wet from them. No one without a death-wish would ever be standing in the lake among the ice. Not even for fine linen shirts like the one she seemed to be washing.

Stiles was never quite considered an idiot. He was not a changeling any more than his mother was-his mother who had hailed from somewhere far north and whose hair and eyes seemed whispy by comparison to the level heads of the city-but she had had stories and Stiles had taken them for as long as she had breath enough to tell them. All he could think was _Bean nighe_. All he could breath was a startled. "_Washerwoman_."

She turned to look at him, webbed hand on her her basket-the shirt tucked in with the other floating garments-and all Stiles could think was, _those could be my father's shirts, those could be Melissa's shirts, those could be Scott's shirts_.

Even if the clothes looked far too fine to ever be any of _theirs_.

It was impulse. Stiles did what he did best-he didn't think, he didn't pay any mind to Scott saying, "We're brothers now and..."

Scott was still looking out towards the town and the lights that were beginning to dot the windows of the houses. Scott never noticed the woman with the basket, or that anything was amiss until Stiles lunged full body half off the dock for the basket. It was a miracle that he didn't fall to a frozen death as he clasped the woven handle of the washer basket and ripped it from webbed fingers. The hands were blue with cold and Stiles kept his eyes on them instead of looking up at the monsters eyes. Their jagged nails released and he spilled the sopping clothes out onto the deck with a choked sound that might have been desperation.

He was not a changeling and even if he resented the careful eyes of his now brother, that didn't mean he was willing to release him either.

The sound of wet cloth on wood jerked Scott from the houses to the planks. "Woah-woah. What?"

Stiles was already on his hands and knees, sorting the clothing that was torn with blood and ash. His fingers were turning red-purple with cold but traitorous thoughts kept them from burning. There was children's dress and a woman's dress and a very, very fine jacket made of dark blue wool that has a crest Stiles didn't recognize but Scott did.

"Stiles," Scott breathed, unsure of how the clothing got there but unwilling to ignore it. He plucked the dress shirt up and searched it in the glowing gloom and then searched Stiles face, still turned down to the other clothes. "What did you do?"

"What did _I_ do?" Stiles grunted, gesturing sideways towards the think in the lake. "I took-"

_I didn't want you to go away so I made sure it couldn't..._

"Was it just floating there?" Scott frowned and Stiles gave him an affronted look-turning himself to directly address the nightmare in the water-his hand swinging outward towards it.

"No-I-" It was gone. In the water there was just ice. It moaned against the mooring.

"This is the Hale-crest." Scott continued, ignoring the dissent and he smoothed the shirt out between his fingers. "But-they've been gone...and this blood."

They both turned, the rest of the clothes at Scott's feet and Stiles' knees, to the mountains. It'd been fourteen years since the last festival up on the hillside where the castle used to stand. Both were too young to remember it but Stiles' mom had whispered stories to them over warm spiced water. They had asked more about the sweetbreads than about the history and the promises thereof but they could remember enough. _Away with the old things. The fires that took the Hales burned the magic from the land and seared out the danger. The only thing that had been left was the cold and the chill and the fire on the mountain every fifteen years_.

Legend. Legend. Only that. Mr. Harris scuffed at the tales and told them that the Castle had been burned when the town decided they no longer needed a king. The Hales had left by then. Stiles never believed him, had favored the tales about how each of the children who burned alive could be heard on cold nights howling in the wind.

It was in that light that he held his breath.

Up on the hillside, where bits of rock and wood still stood, he swore he saw a fire. It glowed red and low-like embers smoldering and smoking after being doused with fresh snow. Beside him Scott clutched a shirt that shouldn't exist, least of all with a Washerwoman who only washed the clothes of the _to die_ rather than those who were already passed.

They ran home, fingers and lips so cold that they burned with the heat of the fire that Melissa had tended all day.

"Where were you?" She asked as they tumbled through the door but neither one could answer. Their words had dried up like the washerwoman's clothes. Outside the wind, or wolves, began to howl.

* * *

The castle didn't burn slowly. When the fires were lit a hundred years ago (and fourteen years ago and twenty-nine years ago and forty-four and fifty-nine) they smoldered hot-creeping through the castle on top of tapestries and down staircases. It smothered the sleeping children, trapped the adults, sent the Hales howling and screaming to the windows where they reached out beyond the bars grasping, hoping, and seeing only cruelly reflected back.

Humans feared magic, it was their nature.

This was not nature.

Which was why, perhaps, there was such a cycle of it.

Year fourteen of fifteen and the ghosts breathed life into the icy hillside, traced their well-worn paths, learned of the clothes that were washed in the icy northern lake on the long side of town, and were put to rest again on year fifteen.

Except this time when Derek Hale woke up on January twenty-second in a wisp of a castle that had been gone for a century-he looked, looked, and felt _cold_. When he shook his head, snow fell from his hair, along with the green leaves that came from the last ending and stayed through the long sleep.

"Laura." His voice was a snap, a crackle that pulled from the woods that had grown up around the ruins that existed-and didn't. "_Laura_."

"_Derek_." Laura left footprints in the snow and splattered them along the ghost carpet at the foot of his bed. Solid, yet not. It was a red woven cover to the snow that touched it-but didn't. "_Welcome back_."

But that wasn't right. Derek could feel the cold-he could also see their home: there, but not there. He lunged off the bed, grabbing Laura across the shoulders and shoving his sister back into the there-but-not wall. He growled into her laughing throat, feeling the pulse-but-not thrumming as living as a humming bird. "What did you do?"

His voice rose, solid and more real than imagined, and Laura's ringing laughter sounded the same. It echoed and birds escaped the evergreens. The walls around them softened, fading into less-reality and Derek felt himself want to reach out and grab them back. "I didn't do anything, Derek-but someone else _did_."

And in that statement Derek felt everything drop and unravel.

When it stopped his feet were firm on the ground and the snow around what used to be his home started seeping into the soft house-shoes he had worn a hundred years earlier when the fire began.


End file.
